


Wedding Dress

by Blurble



Series: Wedding (GON) [1]
Category: Aveyond
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 08:39:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5327741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blurble/pseuds/Blurble





	Wedding Dress

_First there was some silky sort of…_  
“Slip, m’lady” the woman offers, helpfully.  
“Don’t call me m’lady,” Mel says, a tired refrain.   
  
“You’ll have to get used to it,” Edward had said, when she complained to him one day during a rare treasure of a free moment.   
“Why? Does  _everyone_  do it?”  
“Pretty much,” He said. “Well… Except for you.” And he smiled at her in a way that made her feel dizzy and weak at the knees. Which was ridiculous because he hadn’t said anything that brilliant- More like cheesy. Stupid.  _Lame_  
Damn the boy. It had been a temporary fit of madness that had made her accept his proposal, albeit a madness that seemed to recur every time she spoke to him. Or saw him. Or was in the same general section of the castle as him.  
Well, now she was getting married to him, wasn’t she? What a fine fix she was in.  
  
 _And after that came this massive monstrosity that rustled_  
And was surprisingly light, actually, even if it was enormous. There was no sneaking through narrow passageways with this thing on.  
“Do I really have to wear this?” She asks.  
“Oh, absolutely.” The woman says, looking horrified in a well-mannered, dignified way. “It goes under the skirts.”  
“To… pouf them up?”  
“To give them an elegant shape, yes.”  
  
“I am absolutely not wearing a corset, no matter how lovely a shape it will grant me,” she had announced one day, fleeing for a moment to her friends.  
Her friends, that was, plus Lydia.  
Tei’jal looked at her wearily. “It could be much, much worse, pumpkin. You could be human, like me- Oh wait, you are already. Never mind. It is exactly as bad as you think.”  
“I think perhaps you need some more rest, dear. Your body is not fully adjusted to the transition to being mortal, or that you actually need to sleep now.” Galahad said, resting a solicitous hand on his wife's shoulder.   
“You are enjoying this far too much, husband of mine. I fear my sense of humor has rubbed off on you.”  
“What? Never!” Galahad said, looking possibly a little  _too_  innocent.  
Tei’jal sighed. “You are probably right…Well then, I’ll be leaving you, cupcakes. Galahad, accompany me to my room.” And she walked away with every inch of the pride and dignity she had once had as a vampire still preserved in her confident stride.  
  
Ulf by this point had disappeared like the shy little bookworm that he was, which left Lydia and Mel by themselves.  
“What was that you said about a corset?” Lydia asked.  
“They’re monstrous torture devices and I’m not wearing one to the wedding.” Mel said.  
Lydia looked shocked.  
“But you have to! And you might as well start getting used to them already… You’ll be wearing one almost all the time. The queen always has important royal functions to attend, and her style is vastly influential on all the nation’s women. And she need never wear the same gown twice. Why, there’s an army of seamstresses standing ready to create the most stunning gowns, custom fit…” Lydia’s voice trailed off dreamily.  
Mel shuddered.  
  
 _Here came the first layer of the dress itself, soft cream-white silk-_  
  
Which she had chosen herself, actually, for being nice and simple and understated. So naturally in the time between placing the order and having it delivered it had acquire a complex layer of silver embroidery inlaid with sparkling little gems that, oh god, had better not be real diamonds.  
  
There were small towns that could be fed for a year from the sale of this dress. Scratch that, small cities. And she would wear it once and that would be it. It was… it was such a rotten shame.  
  
And her fingers itched whenever she saw it, with the repressed desire to reach out and snag one of those little sparklies for herself. It was ridiculous. It was her own dress, after all. But there was a part of her mind that refused to believe it could possible be hers, the same part that still remembered exactly how to quietly slip away with one of those bulging little purses people wore around here as a fashion accessory.  
  
She hadn’t told him, yet.  
  
She’d made the decision when she was lying there chained up in Gyendal’s mansion, petrified. She didn’t want to think she was going to die. She didn’t want to believe that this was the end, that he’d use her and throw her away and that would be it, end of the world. That first days she’d been frightened to the point of being violently ill. And then he’d dragged her into his meeting chamber and forcibly pressed her hands around the orb.  
  
Nothing happened. She expected Gyendal to curse and rave, but instead he smiled, a thin cold smile.   
  
For some reason she wasn’t thrown back into one of his vaults but rather chained up with some guards in the main hall. She couldn’t imagine why  
  
And so she’d told herself stories about the future.   
  
Mostly stories about Ed. About eloping somewhere, running away from the kingdom and the throne and living happily ever after. Which hadn’t happened.  
  
And also long conversations in her mind, all the things she wanted to tell him all along but never dared.  
  
But when they’d rescued her they’d run desperately back to the Orb of Life. And then they’d returned with Gyendal to the Kingdom and suddenly they were getting married, and wedding and funeral preparations were going on at the same time…  
  
 _A second layer to the dress, some sort of drapy fabric attached with pins made entirely of hand-made lace_  
  
And Mel suddenly find herself blinking back tears.  
  
The fitting lady doesn’t seem to notice. Probably used to over-wrought brides.  
  
But…  
  
The funeral had been small.  
They had thought maybe of doing it bigger. “A Hero’s Burial”.  
But somehow the thought of putting her to rest amidst throngs of people, people who had never known her…  
It would turn it into a party. Just another reason for the kingdom to gather together, and the endless grief would get swallowed up by the masses of people who couldn’t possibly understand what it was they had lost, what it was she had given up solely for them.  
  
So they had a small funeral. Just themselves and a handful of Naylithians.  
  
Ulf had tears streaming from his eyes non-stop the entire ceremony. When they asked him to say something he burst out sobbing so hard that it was clear words were quite beyond him.  
  
Lydia, for once, had not a single nasty thing to say. She was… quiet, and somber. When they asked her to say something she quietly demurred, but as she passed by the casket she has paused for a moment and whispered something no one else could hear.  
  
Galahad stood stiffly at attention. When it was his turn to speak he said “A fine girl, brave and noble. She will be remembered with honor.”   
  
And Tei’jal said some incomprehensible things about existences never ending and that everything exists somewhere at some point in time if you only know the right place to look…  
  
The Naylithians had nothing to say. Truthfully, none of them had really known Stella as anything other than the Guardian. But they had come to pay respects to their kinsperson anyway, and to take her coffin back with them. They were quiet and respectful the entire ceremony.  
  
Finally Ed gave a proper speech. It could have been quite good, really. Only he kept breaking off sentences so that he could regain his composure, and his voice cracked in the middle, and as he began reading through a short list of memories of things she had done (“Always helped with everything. Always really wanted to help. And it wasn’t because she was… It was just that she, she really genuinely had such a deep love for everyone she met-) his voice started trailing off and he sort of stared into the distance and you could see that he wasn’t really reading a speech any more, he was seeing it all over again.  
  
And at that point he’d sort of become useless and Mel had to take over.  
  
She stepped forward and cleared her throat.  
  
“Um… Honestly, when I first met Stella I. I really didn’t like her. Because I was… um… well, I was jealous of her. It was all “Oooh, look, it’s a mysterious person who came floating down, let’s everyone give her lots of attention!” and it sounds pretty horrible in retrospect but I wanted to share it with you anyways so you can understand what I mean when I say that within a week that feeling was completely gone. Because it was impossible to hate Stella. She was just… one of those genuinely  _nice_  people.  
  
I think the only time I ever saw her angry was when she realized Gyendal had stolen her wings. Which is to say that the only person she ever really hated was the most evil person of our generation. For everyone else she was always…   
  
She was good and kind and giving, and in the end she gave us all she had, and I think- I think she was a really incredible person and there isn’t that much else to say. Except.  
  
Except that I-”  
  
And she looked around at the small group standing there looking at her expectantly and was unable to hold in the tears any longer.  
  
“Except that I lost my best friend and I only managed to realize that once she was gone,” She said, and the rest of the ceremony was mostly just… a lot of tears, and hugging, and a big gaping emptiness where someone else should have been.  
  
 _and the veil_  
  
“M’lady?” The woman asks.  
  
Mel jumps.  
  
“Oh, I- Um, I’m sorry, I just-”  
  
She brushes away the wetness on her cheeks and tries to stand straight.  
  
“If you could just… lift your head? No, no, not that high, just… slightly… There we go.”  
  
The woman smiles, a canned, patented smile- Guaranteed to Reassure Anxious Brides or Your Money Back!  
  
“Alright. That’s lovely. Look at what a nice veil this is-”  
  
“Ow!”  
  
“That’s just the clips, dear, they’re a bit tight to make sure the veil doesn’t fall off, don’t worry about-”  
  
For the next eight stabs of pain Mel merely grits her teeth and bears it (There’s a hundred thousand worse pains than a little bit of pressure on your scalp, it was only that she wasn’t expecting it the first time)  
  
Wasn’t expecting to be queen, either. It was so… strange. And she wasn’t really happy about it but she had gone from “There is no way in all of eternity I will be able to live surrounded by nobles all my life” to “Maybe this might just possibly be slightly workable.”  
  
Among other things, nobles weren’t quite as bad as she expected. Thais was different from Harburg, where the nobles were fat and obnoxious. She supposed it was because Thais had more nobles to spare, so they sort of… mellowed out once there were more than ten thousand of them living in one city.  
  
They would all be attending the wedding, of course.  
  
All “the groom’s side”.  
  
She had no family to invite to the wedding, and she was surprised by how much that unexpectedly stung. She really had thought she was used to being an orphan. But it was going to be a massive affair, and she wouldn’t know… anyone.   
  
Btu she would have to know  _everyone_ , eventually. Might as well get started.  
  
 _and finally the crown_  
  
And Mel stood up straight, held her head high, and walked down to the beginning of a life more wonderfully terrible and utterly new than she could ever have imagined, that night as she sneaked quietly through the streets of Harburg to a destiny she hadn’t known was waiting for her. 


End file.
